"It’s our home, but we feel like moving away"

"Regardless of the criminal's place of birth is, they should be punished severely. I long for the day when capital punishment would be put in place. The police force and the defence force are going to have to step it up. The good book says, “He who kills shall be killed.” Some of these bad men walking the streets of Antigua and Barbuda need to learn a lesson. They’re destroying our society"

“Each year the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada deport thousands of people convicted of various crimes to their countries of citizenship in the Caribbean. There is a widely held belief in the Caribbean that recent crime troubles can be tied directly to the activities of deportees who have learnt criminal behaviour in the developed countries,” said a report issued last year by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Latin America and Caribbean region of the World Bank.

The Antiguan government says almost 300 have been returned to the island in the past 10 years. A few were from Britain, but the majority came from the United States. “They are sending back these violent guys. Some left here as babies; they come back as criminals after their graduation from American prison,” said Andy Liburd, editor of the Antigua Sun newspaper. “These people don’t know anyone; they don’t know our culture. Most don’t have family here or if they do, say, have an aunt here she doesn’t want to take them in because of their criminality. Crime is entirely out of control.”

It's one of my pet themes that, where immigration is associated with increased crime, it's not the first generation immigrants who turn out to be bad boys, unless they come from an already dodgy culture like that of Kosovo or Somalia. It's those (a minority, but a significant one in some cultures) who grow up in the new culture (or in our case, and probably in the case of the great American cities, in the lack of culture) who present a problem to the natives. Some of those people then cause a problem 'back a yard' when we kick them out.

She said that Antiguans did not know how to cope with the extreme violence of those who are essentially foreigners ..

The working class natives of London, Birmingham, Manchester face the same issues.

“We’d never seen such ‘bad-mindedness’. It’s beyond control. It’s our home, but we feel like moving away.”